The Front

[Murphy]

Conditioned behaviour, @HMGovt would say learned helplessness, engineered, strategised, incentivised, increasingly gamified, monetised etc

Build devices and software that become the rules of the game, the game itself and all its players, then make it as holistic as possible - connectivity - and draft in billions more nodes

What’s the chemical bridge or key? Dopamine. What happens if you control its release? You can market the fuck out of it beyond the age of the printed page

Has this happened? Yes, across the world. Accelerationism is symptomatic across multiple domains, The Great Secular Hack

Some of the Dudes don’t know anything else, not from ignorance, so it’s either a qualitative factor that doesn’t translate or a quantitive denial of rudimentary proofs, or both

 

[sus]

@luka The substance of this disagreement is whether Silicon Valley techsters are evil hyper-competent brain-hijacking manipulators and my stance is they're just normal levels of bumbling incompetent vaguely sociopath-aspirational but not as good at it as East Coasters

 

[sus]

WYH has repeatedly failed to make the case for what the technobabble "dopamine" adds to our understanding of reward mechanisms

 

[line b]

What makes them 'evil' is the classic California strain of new age utopian mysticism. very bad optics

 

[sus]

what makes them evil is that they're competitors to the Old Media goons who have a stranglehold on global information production and dissemination

 

[Murphy]

Speak for yourself nerd

 

[Murphy]

Like a babe in barbed wire, senseless

 

[sus]

I'll take popularity algorithms any day over top-down message control, the kind we've seen demonstrated in abundance with Covid e.g.

Indeed, the worst part about tech platforms these days is they're slowly ceding territory to that top-down control, e.g. YouTube shutting down dissenters, Facebook and Twitter adding COVID "educational" propaganda to any posts/trending topics that might dissent from orthodoxy, etc

Top-down, centralized, consolidated information control is an order of magnitude worse than bottom-up decentralized but algorithmically-modulated ecosystems

 

[sus]

"It's so evil... things that gets more views rise to the top"

vs literal conspiracies by journos to push political lines that have zero basis in reality, see also when the entire media established decided circa February 2020 that Covid was "racism against asians" and that wearing a mask was racist

Meanwhile all the tech nerds on Twitter were urging their friends to cancel in-person meetings, minimize contact, use hand sanitizer, etc

 

[Murphy]

Great

 

[Murphy]

 

[Murphy]

Want a line of dopamine? It’s the best

 

[Clinamenic]

I think dopamine is used as a proxy for the quantification of pleasure, a seemingly far-from-perfect proxy.

 

[Murphy]

Not pleasure so much as enculturation of need gratification

 

[Clinamenic]

Not pleasure so much as enculturation of need gratification

Yeah I should be more careful with terms here.

Immanent reward.

 

[sus]

FWIW I wouldn't let my kid use social media til he was a teen, either

 

[luka]

Not pleasure so much as enculturation of need gratification

what does this mean?

 

[sus]

I'm sure you're a great parent and making good decisions for them WYH

 

[Murphy]

FWIW I wouldn't let my kid use social media til he was a teen, either

then you find mde.tv charges on your plastic!

 

[shiels]

If I am Buddhist and have a good grasp of the core tenets, what can deleuze or these here process philosophers show me that I don’t already know?

Difficult question @suspended @toko @version